Film experience "Ema" by Pablo Larraín: The girl with the flamethrower

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Newcomer Mariana Di Girolamo as dancer Ema

Photo: Koch Films

The nose of "Ema" leading actress Mariana Di Girolamo turns a little to the right, as if the organ was distracted from something outside of our field of vision.

But maybe that's also imagination, because everything else in the film is in such extreme motion: of course the bodies - "Ema" is a dance film - but also the dialogues, the relationships, the sexual orientations, even the family relationships.

Everything is so dynamic, everything is so open to the unexpected that a school lesson ends in kidnapping and a large-scale betrayal leads to a baby.

In between there is a lot of fire and sleep together.

The summary that "Ema" is about the relationship between the young dancer Ema (Di Girolamo) and the older choreographer Gastón (Gael García Bernal) and their failed attempt to start a family must therefore be understood as provisional.

"Ema" is directed by the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who also wrote the script together with Guillermo Calderón and Alejandro Moreno.

"Ema" is Larraín's eighth film and continues a unique run: Each of Larraín's films - whether the merciless settlement with the Catholic Church "El Club", the melancholy reflection "No" on Chile after the referendum against Pinochet or the two film portraits " Jackie "and" Neruda "about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the national poet Pablo Neruda - is captivatingly good.

He has won dozens of awards, "Jackie" and "No" were also nominated for an Oscar.

The fact that Larraín is still not considered one of the best directors in the world is because his films have almost nothing in common.

While individual periods of the Pinochet dictatorship formed the vague background of his first films, the following works no longer have any subject, no tonality, and certainly not a certain style.

Larraín realigns his film language to the respective material.

He tells a story sometimes realistically, sometimes fantastically, works with the creepy aesthetics of VHS material when it is appropriate as with the "No" set in the eighties, or imitates the glossy appearance of "Life Magazine" when it is like with "Jackie" fits.

Larraín is therefore somewhat perplexed by cinephile film criticism, who likes to view and evaluate the context of works.

If one had to look for a director in film history who had a similarly disparate, yet consistently strong oeuvre, that would be Stanley Kubrick.

But he always included a tableau with a central perspective as a stylistic device, Larraín himself dispensed with such features.

But what you find in each of his films: great movie characters.

With soul, body and desires (even the dark ones, no, especially the dark ones), that a tad

, always just before iconic.

And among these characters, Ema is his most successful creation to date.

As fitting for a dancer, you react to her physically.

The characters in the film do it excessively, they desire them, they find them repulsive, they are outraged about little things like their white-blonde bleached hair.

Ema - and with her actress Di Girolamo in her first and equally sensational leading role - acknowledges her role as a projection surface for others with proud lacony.

She just keeps dancing with her friends from the dance company, whether at rehearsals for the next piece or on the streets of the port city of Valparaíso, which the women use as a backdrop for their reggaeton choreographies.

(Original music: Nicolas Jaar)

"Ema" is still not pure body cinema, because Larraín builds two riddles into his story: what exactly happened between Ema and Gastón, what has shaken their marriage so much and what will become of them now.

Both are told in parallel, which gives the film a nervous tension.

At the same time, the film gains in truthfulness, because how the relationship between Ema and Gastón is broken down, so is the convincing portrait of an artist couple. Their private tragedy plays a role in their art.

As soon as their relationship between a young muse and an older doer changes, this in turn affects their marriage.

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Gael García Bernal plays Gastón as a tired seducer who finally puts down his arms in a grandiose scene.

He no longer likes arguing with his young wife, cannot do anything with her favorite music reggaeton and generally no longer knows what his role in life should be.

The scene can also be understood as a self-parody of Larraín: Together with Gastón he surrenders to his own creation Ema.

But the young woman easily takes over from the older men.

Where their fertility fails, they reach for the flamethrower and shoot a beam of fire into the night.

It has to destroy in order to create something.

Nobody should stand in their way.

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